Captain Marvel Gets Another New Origin Story For Her MCU Debut

The brand new Captain Marvel trailer has been released, bringing with it a whole slew of new details about the MCU’s first solo female hero–including our first confirmation of a pretty major change to her comic book origin story.

Carol Danver’s history has no shortage of complicated reboots and retcons, so the idea that she’s getting yet another reboot isn’t exactly surprising. Her comic book origins are complicated at best and have only recently been modified to be slightly more streamlined care of the recent The Life Of Captain Marvel mini series released this year. However, it seems the movie is going to be putting a completely new spin on things.

We learn in this trailer that Carol genuinely has no memory of her life as a human on Earth–she was “found” by the Kree empire, after some sort of accident, and “saved” by a procedure that looks suspiciously like a run-of-the-mill blood transfusion which, apparently, spliced her genes with Kree DNA. The process enabled her to “live longer, stronger,” which would explain how and why she’ll be blasting into the present (presumably) without having aged after being summoned to Earth by Nick Fury in the present day ahead of Avengers 4, while her solo movie takes place in the 90s.

The addition of amnesia is the real pivot point here. Through her various origins and comic book incarnations, Carol has never really lost sight of the fact that she was born a human–or at least, believed herself to be human. There have been some brief instances of brainwashing and some typical comic book flavored stakes involving memory loss and time travel, but nothing that would really necessitate her origin involve her not remembering Earth.

This change is likely heralding a larger and more mysterious plot point, pointing back to the still as-of-yet unknown role played by Jude Law, who fans long believed to be Mar-Vell before the trailers started dropping. It’s looking more and more likely that Law’s character is, in fact, not Mar-Vell, but a Kree villain named Yon-Rogg who has a history rubbing elbows with some of the more dubious branches of the Kree science departments. The Kree Empire’s obsession with eugenics and hybridization has long since been an undercurrent of their characterization, often culminating in aborted attempts to genetically engineer stronger and more powerful offspring to strengthen their military prowess throughout the galaxy. Add to this the confirmed role of Gemma Chan, playing Kree science officer Minn-Erva, another character with a shady, genetics-obsessed past, and it seems more and more likely that a major turning point of Carol’s MCU story is going to be the revelation that her “accident” and subsequent “rescue” by the Kree was really anything but.